DENMARK – Cover from Horsens, Denmark to Braga, Portugal

Amosvej
8, 2300 København S, Danmark – an address on Amager in Copenhagen – is the
title of the work which the painter and graphic artist Jesper Christiansen (b.
1955) has created for the Stamp Art series. The artist lived at this address
when he painted the work, and the image shows the view from his own studio.

Jesper
Christiansen graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he
also taught as a professor from 2003

to
2008. In public he is particularly well known from an art quiz on DR2, where in
recent years he has appeared as a popular presenter of art. In addition to
receiving the Eckersberg Medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts,
Jesper Christiansen has also been awarded the Danish Arts Foundation’s lifelong
artist grant.

THE
EMPTY ROOM

“I
always wanted my work to look like a stamp,” says Jesper Christiansen. The
first research was done on the internet, where he read that a stamp is
distinguished by its denomination, national designation and the glue on the
reverse. Therefore, these three elements feature prominently on the stamp –
highlighted in fact by short captions to make it absolutely clear that this is
a stamp. Jesper Christiansen went for an ornamental red frame around the
picture to make the white perforations stand out more distinctly and thus
reinforce the stamp look.

The
image shows a work table with the items which actually lay there on the day

Jesper
Christiansen painted the scene. The space is thus full of objects, but empty of
people. “The empty space gives viewers a chance to project themselves into the
work,” explains Jesper Christiansen, who has a certain fondness for painting
empty spaces with an illusion of depth and perspective.

There
is a view through the window of a yellow house, which on closer inspection has
the same windows and rice paper lamps as the room you are in. With a twist of
humour, Jesper Christiansen has created a duplicity in the painting, as if he
is looking at himself in another house.

FROM
SMALL TO BIG

From
working on a small-scale stamp design, Jesper Christiansen has leaped into
quite a different dimension. At the time of writing, he is putting the
finishing touches to seven large paintings of the Paradiso described by Dante
in his Divine Comedy. “Many artists have interpreted the Inferno and the
Purgatorio as depicted in Dante’s work, but I wanted to paint Paradiso,” says
the 60-year-old artist, who has so far created several ceiling-high,
four-metre-wide paintings with images from Paradiso in his studio in Odsherred
in north-western Zealand. The works can be seen at Galerie Mikael Andersen in
central Copenhagen from 22 May as part of a solo exhibition.